Enterprise wiki software developer Atlassian Software delivered Confluence version 2.9 this week, managing to make an easy-to-use product even easier by supporting integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint. Add to that a handful of enhancements and nearly 150 enhancements and bug fixes, and you've got yourself an upgrade worthy of note.

The enterprise wiki space is a bit tricky for a company trying to make a profit. Free options such as the open source, enterprise-focused TWiki and the more general purpose MediaWiki are hard to resist with their rich feature sets and nonexistent price tags. Because of this, any enterprise wiki software with a licensing cost needs to deliver real, measurable value to make any impact at all.

Fortunately for Atlassian, Confluence delivers the goods, and version 2.9 brings even more to the table. Confluence enterprise wiki software has become one of the most popular wiki platforms with its rich feature set and frequent updates, and with 2.9, it introduces Office Connector and SharePoint Connector, two tools designed to make integration easier, as well as search enhancements, improvements to the chart-creation tools, and a number of other tweaks.

The Office Connector tool allows wiki pages to be accessed and edited directly from Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. Although Confluence's own tools for editing pages are easy to use, editing from MS Office applications should put less-technical users back into their comfort zones. As for SharePoint Connector, it basically allows Confluence to search across SharePoint repositories, as well as supporting SharePoint content being pulled into wiki pages, and vice versa. Since many enterprises with both SharePiont and wiki users have overlapping content needs, this is a real benefit.

For additional details on Confluence 2.9 and its capabilities, check the post on the official Confluence blog.

One other note -- if your organization uses Confluence plugins, you may be interested in hearing what Dan Hardiker, developer of more than 20 free plugins, has to say. He's the focus of a Confluence plugin Webinar on Aug. 26, 2008. You'll need sign up to attend, but for plugin developers and users, it ought to be interesting.